article
Why the Taliban poppy ban was very unlikely to have been sustained after a couple of years
Autor
Thoumi, Francisco E.
Institución
Resumen
Professors Farrell and Thorne (2005) have written an interesting paper that shows that the Taliban’s ban on opium poppy cultivation in 2000 resulted in dramatic declines of 90.8% in the number of hectares cultivated with poppy in Afghanistan and 35% in the size of illegal poppy plantings in the world. Since the Taliban controlled area in Afghanistan had the highest opium yield per hectare, the declines in opium production were even larger: 94.3% in Afghanistan and 65.3% in the world! Farrell and Thorne, without praising or defending the Taliban, argue that “this may have been the most effective drug control action of modern times” achieved though a combination of “three principal techniques: the threat of punishment, the close local monitoring and eradication of continued poppy farming, plus the public punishment of transgressors”